The extraordinary work of Tish Murtha is celebrated in the latest exhibition at Baltic in a new show which also highlights the keen eye of Kuba Ryniewicz.

As titles go, ‘Close to Home’ couldn’t get much closer to the home area it reflects. The photography of Tish Murtha seems to fit neatly into the category of Social Realism, but it challenges an older pattern in which the subjects of socially realistic imagery rarely had input or control when it came to the way they were represented, never mind the reasons behind such representation. As a genre, Social Realism was about the outsider looking in which, however well intentioned, resulted in a mainstream view of the marginalised areas of society. Not so with South Shields born photographer Tish Murtha (1956 – 2013) whose lens becomes the eye of the insider, seeing with a deep understanding which is so instinctive as to need no cultural negotiation. Murtha’s camera recorded life as it is lived, a life in which she was rooted from her childhood as part of a large family living on a council estate in Elswick. At this time, any lingering post-war optimism was taking a battering in the North East as the focus of industry changed radically with the closure of mines and shipyards leading to a rise in unemployment, especially amongst school leavers, Murtha, however, took control of her prospects, leaving home in 1976 to study at the School of Documentary Photography at The University of Wales, Newport. This was a ground-breaking venture, set up in 1973 by David Hurn, a member of influential international co-operative Magnum Photos.

After graduating in 1978, Murtha returned to Newcastle and set out to document "marginalized communities from the inside". This led to the then controversial exhibitions Juvenile Jazz Bands and Youth Unemployment (which was raised as a subject of debate in the House of Commons). There were Tyneside commissions, such as the documentation of the Save Scotswood Works campaign (1979) and a period in London working on London by Night, a group exhibition exploring Soho and its sex industry workers. Her return to the North must surely have been inevitable, and the 1987 – 91 series Elswick Revisited adds the dimension of time to her work by tracking changes, most notably in terms of ethnic diversity, in the specific area she had photographed a decade earlier.

Murtha died, way too soon, in 2013, and it is with the creative assistance of her daughter Ella that Baltic now celebrates her career by bringing together works from the four key series Elswick Kids (1978), Elswick Revisited (1987–91), Save Scotswood Works (1979) and Youth Unemployment (1981). While their social backdrop may be economic hardship and public neglect, these photographs forcefully capture a sense of community, association and communication. Two chaps in the pub, behind a casual still life of tabs and beer, lean together to share a whisper that is almost a kiss, there’s music, singalongs you want to join in with, mad wallpaper, forgotten fashions and now, of course, memory, as the past of everyday lives re-emerges in these warm and compelling images.

    But that’s not all – chiming with ideas of lived experience now re-located by memory and capsulated in images that can play with the formalities/immediacies offered by photography is the work of Kuba Ryniewicz, some from his earlier archive and some newly commissioned for this exhibition. There’s something divertingly open-ended about these photographs, with the series Good Eggs and Cornered Study both ongoing, creating lines of connection among friends and sitters, objects and atmospheres. The bike casually propped in the studio where everything is enveloped in a cloud of glamour as the morning light hits a glitter ball, the grey dog sniffing towards a brilliant yellow egg yolk (with the Baltic itself visible in the distance), the folds of flesh and patterns of hair all entrance the eye, and reveal the background in fashion photography that informs Ryniewicz’s aesthetic. An illuminating attention to detail runs through this vision – indeed, the detail often IS the vision, allowing games of scale that force us to refocus how we process what we see. Personal favourite (perhaps because it chimes with my own memories of that bizarre period) is the series Daily Weeding (2020-2021) created during the COVID-19 lockdowns. In that period of confinement small things, domestic rituals, sudden distractions that had previously gone unnoticed all came to the fore, provoking a fresh sense of immediacy and value. Here a group of urban pigeons suddenly scatter in untidy flight, a rose bush dims out of focus to show that day’s floral growth, the texture of grass, a handful of flowering weeds, an impromptu garnish of stalks of grain all invite our body memories not just to see again but also to touch, sniff and reimagine the palpable experience of small sensations that colours our lives.

Different lenses, different viewpoints, but Baltic has brough together two resonating facets of photographic immediacy.

Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz, until 4 April, Baltic, Gateshead, baltic.artPic: Elswick Kids, Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, all rights reserved